[StBernard] Obama and the Politics of Crowds

[Westley Annis]

Obama and the Politics of Crowds 

The masses greeting the candidate on the trail are a sign of great unease.

By FOUAD AJAMI

There is something odd -- and dare I say novel -- in American politics about
the crowds that have been greeting Barack Obama on his campaign trail.
Hitherto, crowds have not been a prominent feature of American politics. We
associate them with the temper of Third World societies. We think of places
like Argentina and Egypt and Iran, of multitudes brought together by their
zeal for a Peron or a Nasser or a Khomeini. In these kinds of societies, the
crowd comes forth to affirm its faith in a redeemer: a man who would set the
world right.

Martin KozlowskiAs the late Nobel laureate Elias Canetti observes in his
great book, "Crowds and Power" (first published in 1960), the crowd is based
on an illusion of equality: Its quest is for that moment when "distinctions
are thrown off and all become equal. It is for the sake of this blessed
moment, when no one is greater or better than another, that people become a
crowd." These crowds, in the tens of thousands, who have been turning out
for the Democratic standard-bearer in St. Louis and Denver and Portland, are
a measure of American distress.

On the face of it, there is nothing overwhelmingly stirring about Sen.
Obama. There is a cerebral quality to him, and an air of detachment. He has
eloquence, but within bounds. After nearly two years on the trail, the
audience can pretty much anticipate and recite his lines. The political
genius of the man is that he is a blank slate. The devotees can project onto
him what they wish. The coalition that has propelled his quest --
African-Americans and affluent white liberals -- has no economic coherence.
But for the moment, there is the illusion of a common undertaking --
Canetti's feeling of equality within the crowd. The day after, the crowd
will of course discover its own fissures. The affluent will have to pay for
the programs promised the poor. The redistribution agenda that runs through
Mr. Obama's vision is anathema to the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and the
hedge-fund managers now smitten with him. Their ethos is one of competition
and the justice of the rewards that come with risk and effort. All this is
shelved, as the devotees sustain the candidacy of a man whose public career
has been a steady advocacy of reining in the market and organizing those who
believe in entitlement and redistribution.

A creature of universities and churches and nonprofit institutions, the
Illinois senator, with the blessing and acquiescence of his upscale
supporters, has glided past these hard distinctions. On the face of it, it
must be surmised that his affluent devotees are ready to foot the bill for
the new order, or are convinced that after victory the old ways will endure,
and that Mr. Obama will govern from the center. Ambiguity has been a
powerful weapon of this gifted candidate: He has been different things to
different people, and he was under no obligation to tell this coalition of a
thousand discontents, and a thousand visions, the details of his political
programs: redistribution for the poor, postracial absolution and "modernity"
for the upper end of the scale.

It was no accident that the white working class was the last segment of the
population to sign up for the Obama journey. Their hesitancy was not about
race. They were men and women of practicality; they distrusted oratory, they
could see through the falseness of the solidarity offered by this campaign.
They did not have much, but believed in the legitimacy of what little they
had acquired. They valued work and its rewards. They knew and heard of
staggering wealth made by the Masters of the Universe, but held onto their
faith in the outcomes that economic life decreed. The economic hurricane
that struck America some weeks ago shook them to the core. They now seek
protection, the shelter of the state, and the promise of social repair. The
bonuses of the wizards who ran the great corporate entities had not bothered
them. It was the spectacle of the work of the wizards melting before our
eyes that unsettled them.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the late Democratic senator from New York, once set
the difference between American capitalism and the older European version by
observing that America was the party of liberty, whereas Europe was the
party of equality. Just in the nick of time for the Obama candidacy, the
American faith in liberty began to crack. The preachers of America's decline
in the global pecking order had added to the panic. Our best days were
behind us, the declinists prophesied. The sun was setting on our imperium,
and rising in other lands.

A younger man, "cool" and collected, carrying within his own biography the
strands of the world beyond America's shores, was put forth as a herald of
the change upon us. The crowd would risk the experiment. There was grudge
and a desire for retribution in the crowd to begin with. Akin to the
passions that have shaped and driven highly polarized societies, this
election has at its core a desire to settle the unfinished account of the
presidential election eight years ago. George W. Bush's presidency remained,
for his countless critics and detractors, a tale of usurpation. He had
gotten what was not his due; more galling still, he had been bold and
unabashed, and taken his time at the helm as an opportunity to assert an
ambitious doctrine of American power abroad. He had waged a war of choice in
Iraq.

This election is the rematch that John Kerry had not delivered on. In the
fashion of the crowd that seeks and sees the justice of retribution, Mr.
Obama's supporters have been willing to overlook his means. So a candidate
pledged to good government and to ending the role of money in our political
life opts out of public financing of presidential campaigns. What of it? The
end justifies the means.

Save in times of national peril, Americans have been sober, really
minimalist, in what they expected out of national elections, out of politics
itself. The outcomes that mattered were decided in the push and pull of
daily life, by the inventors and the entrepreneurs, and the captains of
industry and finance. To be sure, there was a measure of willfulness in this
national vision, for politics and wars guided the destiny of this republic.
But that American sobriety and skepticism about politics -- and leaders --
set this republic apart from political cultures that saw redemption lurking
around every corner.

My boyhood, and the Arab political culture I have been chronicling for well
over three decades, are anchored in the Arab world. And the tragedy of Arab
political culture has been the unending expectation of the crowd -- the
street, we call it -- in the redeemer who will put an end to the decline,
who will restore faded splendor and greatness. When I came into my own, in
the late 1950s and '60s, those hopes were invested in the Egyptian Gamal
Abdul Nasser. He faltered, and broke the hearts of generations of Arabs. But
the faith in the Awaited One lives on, and it would forever circle the Arab
world looking for the next redeemer.

America is a different land, for me exceptional in all the ways that matter.
In recent days, those vast Obama crowds, though, have recalled for me the
politics of charisma that wrecked Arab and Muslim societies. A leader does
not have to say much, or be much. The crowd is left to its most powerful
possession -- its imagination.


>From Elias Canetti again: "But the crowd, as such, disintegrates. It has a

presentiment of this and fears it. . . . Only the growth of the crowd
prevents those who belong to it from creeping back under their private
burdens."

The morning after the election, the disappointment will begin to settle upon
the Obama crowd. Defeat -- by now unthinkable to the devotees -- will bring
heartbreak. Victory will steadily deliver the sobering verdict that our
troubles won't be solved by a leader's magic.

Mr. Ajami is professor of Middle Eastern Studies at the School of Advanced
International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, and an adjunct research
fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution